(Heaven, Canto 3, lines 87-91) 

What does it mean to rest in “the will of God”? 

There are cold and rigid answers to this question. But such is not the answer I contemplate in Dante’s “Paradiso.” The path to paradise is the path of the lover journeying home to the beloved. It is the path toward “resting” in the will that is wholly Love.

This is the journey of one who longs for love all the way to that threshold of a Love beyond all expectation. “Your wondrous face/ That I see now, diversity endows/ With inner light of an amazing grace.” 

The lover approaches the beloved and feels himself or herself transformed by the presence of the beloved. Submission to God’s will means allowing ourselves to be embraced by that Divine Love which makes all aspects of the journey clear, even blessed. To will “what we have, with no desire for more” is the state of the soul liberated by love, liberated to love, liberated for love, as Lady Julian of Norwich said centuries ago. 

Dante has given himself over to his new guide in Paradiso. No longer, Virgil, the poet, the philosopher, to whom Dante looked up. His new guide was Beatrice, whom Dante loved and adored. 

Why, then, the darkness in the panel if all is love, goodness, beauty, truth? 

Darkness is God’s own precious creature. Only in the deepest darkness of night unspoiled by ambient light can we discern the more distant stars or the splash of the Milky Way across the sky. God fills the darkness with Love as surely as God fills the light. 

We are reminded in these pages, however, that love suffers often, and often greatly. Love is not immune from uncertainty. Love knows insecurity. Love hangs in the air, as Soren Kierkegaard suggests, ten thousand fathoms above the eternal chasm. But this is because God, the Unnameable, Ultimate Being, the knowledge of whom is too wonderful for us, is the Groundless Ground of all Being. 

Poet Robert Frost once intimated that the greatest risk God ever took was to render Spirit in Substantiation. The vulnerability of incarnation, as told in the gospels, reminds us that the nails that held Jesus of Nazareth to a Roman cross left scars that did not fade from his resurrected hands. 

A question lingers over Dante’s Paradise: Can we bless that which wounded us along the way? Can we ever rejoice in the scarring memory of moments of fear, pain, betrayal, isolation and abuse? 

On the other side of Love’s full purging presence, yes. 

Yes. 

To all that leads to Love, yes. And from all that descends from Love, yes. 

Denial of reality has no place in paradise. Finally we can face that which is real, is true, is love, as delusions are spent, burned away, as wishful thinking is replaced by reality. Finally we can bless the path in its wholeness, even the hell in each of us that resisted love, until it too is burned away.